Ruth Crawford Seeger - String quartet (1931) Terzo e quarto Movimento

Ruth Crawford Seeger (July 3, 1901 - November 18, 1953), born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.


In the twenties and early thirties, Crawford Seeger wrote atonal works influenced by Alexander Scriabin. These works favored dissonance and post-tonal harmonies; they also utilized irregular rhythms and meters. Her technique may have been influenced by the music of Schoenberg, although they met only briefly during her studies in Germany. She was encouraged and guided by her teacher-then-husband Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint, as well—and also developed her own methods of composing.


Ruth Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, and began her music education at age 6 with her first piano lesson. Later she studied with her mother. She studied with Madame Valborg Collett later on, who was a student of Agathe Grøndahl. Later, she continued at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn. She learned composition from Adolf Weidig, whose instruction accelerated her skill. But her study under Djane Lavoie Herz, a disciple of Scriabin, was important for the social and intellectual world it opened for her. During this time, she met Cowell, Rudhya, and the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg whose writings she eventually set to music.


Later that year she became the first woman to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Berlin. (Hisama 2001, p. 3). Despite being in the heart of German modernism, she chose to study and compose alone. Yet, through letters, Seeger’s ideas were crucial to the development of her style and selections. She and Seeger married in 1932 after her second Guggenheim award and subsequent trip to Paris. Notably, at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam (1933) her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings was the only piece by an American performed that year.


The family, including Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Barbara, Penny, and stepson Pete Seeger, moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after Charles’ appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C. Crawford Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Her arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs are among the most respected including transcriptions for: American Folk Songs for Children, Animal Folksongs for Children (1950) and American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953) Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA by John and Alan Lomax. However she is most well known for Our Singing Country (1941.) She also composed Rissolty Rossolty, an ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes, for the CBS radio series American School of the Air.


She briefly returned to her modernist roots in early 1952 with Suite for Wind Quintet. She died the following year, from intestinal cancer, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.


Crawford began her career as an experimental composer, but the label only truly applies to her early works. Her work in traditional music preservation may have come from her interest in Eastern mysticism and the musical complexities of Native American music. Her conceptual palette was affected by American literary transcendentalism as well. As a composer, she may be thought of as the musical bridge between the modern and transcendental movements.

Gyorgy Ligeti - Chamber Concerto, Mvt. 3

Gyorgi Ligeti:


Ligeti’s creative outlook has been formed by his experiences under two dictatorships – those of Hitler and Stalin.


A Jew born in Transylvania just as Hungary was losing that region to Romania, he survived World War II in a labour camp (his brother and father, less fortunate, both died in Auschwitz).


Following the war, he studied and taught at the Budapest Academy, but fled after the crushing of the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. Arriving in Cologne he became an associate of Stockhausen at the WDR electronic music studio, where he rapidly caught up on the musical developments from which he had been cut off in Hungary.


In the 1960s he emerged as a leading member of the international avant-garde. Since then he has lived mostly in Hamburg and Vienna, becoming an Austrian citizen in 1967.


As Ligeti has remarked of the traumatic experiences which have shaped his life and artistic outlook, “I am permanently scarred; I will be overcome by revenge fantasies to the end of my days.”


And yet, despite his work’s penchant for the surreal and the grotesque, he is the most approachable, as well as one of the most fascinating and compelling, of postwar composers.


A feeling of loss and nostalgia characterizes much of his output, often evoked by the haunting modalities of East European folk music – but pathos is balanced by absurdist humour, most notoriously in the twenty-minute Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes, a surreal jeu d’esprit which, composed shortly after Ligeti’s arrival in the West, signalled his intention of finding an entirely personal route out of the creative impasse of post-war music.


Ligeti’s highly individual creative trajectory – as embodied by the tongue-in-cheek Poème – was developed in his orchestral works of the 1960s such as Apparitions, Atmosphères and Lontano.


Rejecting the serial complexities favoured by contemporaries such as Stockhausen and Boulez, these early works instead embarked on a back-to-basics re-examination of music from the bottom up, stripping away all extraneous musical matter in favour of a style based on pure texture, with vast masses of sound in the process of slow creation and transformation.


At the same time, Ligeti’s maverick sense of humour expressed itself in the quasi-theatrical Aventures and Nouvelles aventures, a pair of exuberant vocal works setting nonsense phonetic texts, and the imposing Requiem, Ligeti’s summatory early work, which combines the sound-mass textures of the orchestral pieces and the zany theatricals of Aventures to disturbing effect.


The cloudy sound-masses of these early works are typically created out of microscopic tangles of intertwined instrumental lines – a kind of musical spider’s web, described by the composer as “micro-polyphony”.


In Ligeti’s works of the later 1960s and early 1970s the lines gradually become clearer, reintroducing a sense – albeit a rather peculiar one – of melody, counterpoint and harmony, while rhythm also resurfaces, often in the form of crazily superimposed pulses or psychotically fast instrumental outbursts, like the deranged functioning of some vast mechanical instrument.


In works such as the Chamber Concerto, Melodien and the Double Concerto for flute and oboe Ligeti pushes this style to its limits, creating a compellingly strange musical world, at once eerie and beautiful.